The Charge

"A Freudian Slip is saying one thing and meaning a mother."

Opening Statement

The second season of Cheers has hit the streets, in an offering almost
identical to the previous season. Sporting a new digital transfer, this DVD is
the perfect vessel to preserve the posterity of the show for all of time.

Not that it really needs preserving; most of us can recite these episodes in
our heads. Nevertheless, Paramount has put together a great DVD box set of one
of the most endearing television shows of all time, and it deserves the respect
that a gigantic robot terrorizing and eating people would deserve.

A lot, in case you were wondering. A lot.

Facts of the Case

Cheers: The Complete Second Season contains all 22 episodes from the
second season, unedited and digitally remastered:

Disc One

Power Play Li'l Sister Don't Cha Personal Business
Homicidal Ham Summer's Return Affairs of The Heart

Disc Two

Old Flames Manager Coach They Called Me Mayday How Do I
Love Thee, Let Me Call You Back Just Three Friends Where There's a
Will

Disc Three

Battle of The Exes No Help Wanted And Coachie Makes Three
Cliff's Rocky Moment Fortunate and Men's Weight Snow Job

The Evidence

Cheers is the product of a different era in television; a time in
television history where a show with absolutely no ratings would be allowed to
stay on the air, until it found an audience, even if the process took years,
hemorrhaging money along the way. Alas, it seems that nowadays, a show only
lasts a few episodes on a network before being endlessly shuffled from timeslot
to timeslot before being unceremoniously dropped. Luckily for Cheers, it
only took a year for the world to catch on.

Truly amazing, then, that a show that ranked absolutely dead stinking last
in the Nielsen ratings the week it debuted (a staggering 77th place) could spawn
into one of the most successful, most heavily syndicated, and longest-running
television shows in the history of the medium. If you count the Fraiser
spin-off, the franchise has had staying power for an astonishing 22 years.

As a child, Cheers was one of the only television shows I ever truly
attached myself to with any seriousness. Very few other shows have had such
endearing, multi-faceted characters or such extraordinary longevity. Personally,
my fondest memories of the show are seasons four and five—the Woody years,
with the addition of Frasier to the cast, but well before the departure of
Shelly Long (Diane), at which point, the show strapped the Fonz to its back and
jumped the proverbial shark.

In one of the supplementary extras, during a discussion about Diane's
character, she is described as the absolute best female role ever created for
television. I am inclined to agree with this statement. At times, Diane is the
show, and truly you will not find a more complex, intelligent, precocious, or
challenging female character anywhere else. If such a metaphor could be applied,
these early seasons of Cheers were the "salad years" of the
show—things sure got clumsy when Shelly Long left the show to pursue a
"glamorous" and "successful" acting career. Though it did
suffer, the show did avoid complete and utter disaster, even after the departure
of two major cast members—yet another testament to the incredible staying
power of the sitcom.

In terms of development, many things happen in the second season of
Cheers, like Diane and Sam beginning their tumultuous
relationship…and, er…well, actually, that's basically it. No
kidding. And, amazingly, this is more than sufficient to fuel the show for an
entire season. This is, if anything, a credit to the producers and writers of
the show, who were hot off the heels of their hit show Taxi and knew
exactly what to do with Cheers to make it a stunning success. Season two
was also the year that John Ratzenberger (AKA Cliff) was added to the cast as a
regular member; in the first season, he was merely a secondary star and was
billed at the end of the show.

Considering the footage is 20 years old, the show looks fantastic. The
transfer is superb, and though the occasional scratch or dust particle rears its
head, the show has never looked this good and will never look this good again.
Paramount has immaculately restored and remastered the original source material,
and it shows. Compared to the previous season, the colors even look nicer this
time around, vibrant and full of definition, and black levels are quite
impressive. There are no peculiar transfer defects or harsh edges; everything is
sharp, clear, and full of detail.

The sound is less spectacular, but still quite a good presentation. Dialogue
is always clear, at times, cavernous and echoic (merely how the show was
recorded), and mixed very naturally and neutral. With a surround sound receiver,
the laugh track ends up in the rear channel, which is acceptable, because there
is nothing else back there anyway.

Paramount was also kind enough to include chapter stops at appropriately
opportune moments that coincide with the commercial break. I mean, after 11
years, most of us are sick of hearing the Cheers theme song, and being
able to skip it cleanly is something to give thanks for. Surprisingly, some
television shows still do not include this feature, and so it is worth
noting.

The extras consist primarily of short featurettes with titles like
"Cliff's Notes: The Wisdom of Cliff Claven" and "Strictly Top
Shelf: The Guys Behind the Bar" and include recycled episode footage,
archival interviews from 1983 with cast and creators, and some modern interview
footage with Ted Danson, Rhea Perlman, and George Wendt. They are nothing
spectacular and on par with the fairly poor offering from the previous season. A
gag reel is also included, and, despite its brevity (a mere four minutes), it
offers some genuinely amusing gaffes mastered from a very old, very poorly
preserved videotape.

Closing Statement

Cheers is the comfort food of syndicated television. It is the
channel-surfing equivalent of whatever your mother cooked for you when you were
a kid that, to this day, will still make you feel safe and good and secure.

The DVD is a trickier sell to the casual viewer, since even today, the show
is syndicated at an extremely aggressive rate; but for everyone else who loves
the bar in Boston, these DVDs are no-brainers. They look good, they sound good,
and at the touch of a remote, you can have your good old-fashioned home-cooked
television anytime you want.

Bon appetit!

The Verdict

I have to actually recommend this? What's wrong with you people? It's
freakin' Cheers, man!